Identity & Community: Introduction

INTRODUCTION WELCOME TO FACING HISTORY AND OURSELVES Through professional development seminars, resource books, study guides, conferences, and Web activities, Facing History and Ourselves provides educators with models for creating a unit or a course that integrates significant historical content with a tested methodology to engage students in thinking about the lessons of the past for the present and future. Facing History and Ourselves is distinguished from other organizations through its focus on pedagogy, its strong connection to scholarship, and its long-term relationships with its teachers. This comprehensive approach results in high-quality materials and strategies for the classroom and support for teachers, including the ongoing follow-up they need. The approach engages young people in studying their history and heritage in a way that makes the lessons relevant to the choices they face in their everyday lives. Young people are growing up in a world tested by conflict and rife with extremism. As shepherds of the next generation, it is our responsibility to give them the tools to think critically, understand the connection between history and ethics, and understand how the lessons of history can help guide them through the moral choices they face in the present and future. Facing History is well positioned to reach junior and senior high school students with these essential lessons and to support their teachers in providing a high-quality learning experience. The language and vocabulary emphasized in Facing History’s materials are tools for entry into the study of history. When students study concepts such as identity, membership, legacy, denial, responsibility, and judgment, they understand complicated history as a constellation of individual and group choices and behaviors. By focusing on participation, Facing History students learn that the events of history were not inevitable but were instead determined by the conscious choices of individuals and groups, and that the brave and moral acts of small numbers of people can grow and reverberate into powerful forces that influence the course of history. Democracies are fragile enterprises and can only remain vital through the active, thoughtful, and responsible participation of their citizens. Education for global citizenship means encouraging students to recognize that their participation matters. Facing History and Ourselves helps teachers and students explore particular moments in history and in our own lives with the hope of finding ways to strengthen our communities in order to prevent violence and injustice. High-quality education for all children should be framed within the perspective of what we at Facing History and Ourselves have called “head and heart.” It is an education that balances cognitive understanding and skill acquisition with the capacity for empathy, courage, and compassion that marks the determination to stand up for human rights in the present and future. Our students are at heart moral philosophers, seeking to express themselves in productive ways so they can both engage with and shape the worlds they inhabit. In order to be participants in society, students need the habits, skills, and knowledge that will allow them to discover who they are, what they believe, and how to make an impact. For our democracy to thrive and for it to be truly compassionate, equitable, and just, young people need help developing their burgeoning moral philosophy—their unique voices—in complex, academically rigorous, and personal ways.

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Students come to us with already formed notions of prejudice and tolerance. As they move through childhood and adolescence, their issues take deep hold: overarching interest in individual and group identity and concern with acceptance or rejection, conformity or nonconformity, labeling, ostracism, loyalty, fairness, and peer group pressure. Our pedagogy must speak to newly discovered ideas of subjectivity, competing truths, and differing perspectives, along with a growing capacity to think hypothetically and an inclination to find personal meaning in newly introduced issues. We must teach students to make distinctions among events and to see connections without making facile comparisons and imperfect parallels. In order to make sense of the present and future, students need an opportunity to find meaning in the past. We can trust them to examine history in all of its complexities, including its legacies of prejudice and discrimination, resilience and courage. This trust encourages young people, and their teachers, to develop a voice in conversations with their peers as well as in the critical discussions and debates of their communities, their nation, and the world.

FACING HISTORY

IN

MEMPHIS, TENNESSEE

Facing History and Ourselves has had a long-standing relationship with the Memphis community. Indeed, the city of Memphis has served as one of the inspirations for Facing History. Margot Stern Strom, Facing History’s founder, grew up in Memphis and consistently writes about how her experiences growing up there have shaped her commitment to democracy, civic participation, and equity. In 1992, Facing History’s relationship with Memphis was formalized by the establishment of a regional office in the city. Since that time, Facing History has collaborated with the Memphis community on projects ranging from bringing world-renowned speakers to Memphis for public forums to publishing a serialized memoir of a Holocaust survivor in The Commercial Appeal to mounting exhibitions such as Choosing to Participate. As of the writing of this text, Facing History is involved in nearly 500 public and private schools in the southeast, providing professional development and curricular materials to educators and administrators. We also have a significant presence in Memphis-area institutions of higher education. Facing History has enjoyed a particularly robust relationship with the Memphis city and Shelby county school systems. By 2009, every sixth, seventh, and eighth grade social studies course in both the city and county school systems will include a Facing History unit. The unit Identity and Community introduces sixth grade students to important social studies concepts and builds a vocabulary around themes such as belonging, membership, and democracy. In the seventh grade, students study the steps leading up to the Holocaust as a way to learn about how groups and individuals make decisions that can result in hate and violence or that can promote peace and justice. The eighth grade Facing History unit, Choices in Little Rock, focuses on the desegregation of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. At the high school level, students can continue to explore Facing History’s themes of participation, democracy, and genocide prevention by taking a Facing History elective course. Facing History program staff in the Memphis office also facilitate student leadership groups, organize student symposia, and lead civil rights tours for students.

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